In-Network Processing For Mission-Criticalwireless Networked Sensing And Control: A Real-Time, Efficiency, And Resiliency Perspective

IN-NETWORK PROCESSING FORMISSION-CRITICALWIRELESSNETWORKED SENSING AND CONTROL: A REAL-TIME, EFFICIENCY, ANDRESILIENCY PERSPECTIVEbyQIAO XIANGAugust 2014 Advisor: Dr. Hongwei ZhangMajor: Computer ScienceDegree: Doctor of Philosophy As wireless cyber-physical systems (WCPS) are increasingly being deployed in mission-critical applications, it becomes imperative that we consider application QoS requirements inin-network processing (INP). In this dissertation, we explore the potentials of two INP meth-ods, packet packing and network coding, on improving network performance while satisfyingapplication QoS requirements. We find that not only can these two techniques increase theenergy efficiency, reliability, and throughput of WCPS while satisfying QoS requirements ofapplications in a relatively static environment, but also they can provide low cost proactiveprotection against transient node failures in a more dynamic wireless environment.We first study the problem of jointly optimizing packet packing and the timeliness of datadelivery. We identify the conditions under which the problem is strong NP-hard, and we findthat the problem complexity heavily depends on aggregation constraints instead of network andtraffic properties. For cases when the problem is NP-hard, we show that there is no polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS); for cases when the problem can be solved in polynomialtime, we design polynomial time, offline algorithms for finding the optimal packet packingschemes. We design a distributed, online protocol tPack that schedules packet transmissions tomaximize the local utility of packet packing at each node. We evaluate the properties of tPackin NetEye testbed. We find that jointly optimizing data delivery timeliness and packet packingand considering real-world aggregation constraints significantly improve network performance.